Despite the WaPo's alarmist take on all the hubbub at the CIA, I agree with the Weekly Standard's Stephen F. Hayes.
ON NOVEMBER 5, 2004, a top aide to new CIA Director Porter Goss warned the associate deputy director of counterintelligence about unauthorized leaks to the media. It was an admonition that might be considered unnecessary: secrecy is a hallmark of the agency and, in any case, such leaks are often against the law. But several officials bristled at the forewarning and after a series of confrontations the deputy director of Operations, Stephen R. Kappes, offered his resignation as a protest. How do we know about all of this? The details were leaked and appeared Saturday on the front page of the Washington Post. Both the Post and the New York Times ran follow-up stories on Sunday. That evening, CBS News anchor John Roberts was already suggesting a failure, asking reporter Joie Chen, "What went wrong?" And so we have, three months into Porter Goss's tenure at the agency, a full-blown war between the Bush administration and the CIA. In fact, this war has been underway for years but only one side--the CIA--has been fighting. The White House response to this latest assault will be an important sign of its willingness to gut the rotten bureaucracy at the CIA. {...}The reporting consists mainly of a one-sided chronology of the dispute over media leaks and a collection of unsourced and unsubstantiated personal smears of the Goss team. As for substance, the Post reported on Saturday that former deputy CIA director John McLaughlin believes top Goss aide Patrick Murray "was treating senior officials disrespectfully." The article continues: "Current and retired senior managers have criticized Goss, former chairman of the House intelligence committee, for not interacting with senior managers and for giving Murray too much authority over day-to-day operations." The Post article from Sunday replowed much of the same ground. It added one new wrinkle: Goss has not yet made time to meet with four former senior CIA officials. (These weren't just any officials. According to the article, "the four senior officials represent nearly two decades of experience leading the Directorate of Operations under both Republican and Democratic presidents." The not-so-subtle implication is that Goss was unreasonable for failing to meet with the leaders. Was he? According to yet another anonymous source in the Post piece on Sunday, the group didn't want to talk so much as they wanted to lecture. The former officials "wanted to talk as old colleagues and tell him to stop what he was doing the way he was doing it." After hundreds of words from the Post we still have very little idea of what, exactly, Goss is doing that has caused so much heartburn at the agency. But if he's aggressively reforming the bureaucracy, he should most certainly not stop what he is doing. In fact, the concern among critics of the agency is that Goss faces a nearly impossible job and will not do nearly enough to change the dysfunctional culture of the agency.While Hayes' critique of the WaPo article once again shows off the WaPo's inside the beltway bias, as the reporter seems to fret more about losing valuable leaks if everyone resigns, it confirms the suspicions I had when I read the piece on Friday: Goss is cleaning house. And he doesn't really care how he does it, or who gets their noses out of joint in the meantime. Good. It's about freakin' time someone showed those entrenched mandarins the door. What's really amazing about the WaPo piece, however, is that the guys who are resiging are the same men who dropped the ball on 9/11. They're they same men who dropped the ball on WMD in Iraq. They're the same men who apparently can't find their collective ass even when it's handed to them on a silver platter. Why, I'll even bet a few of them were on staff when the Soviet Union fell in August of 1991. Why, my devoted Cake Eater readers, are these resignations a sign of "turbulence" at the CIA? These guys should have been shown the door ages ago. If this was any other agency in Washington, the media would have been calling for their heads eons ago. If any other bureaucrat in Washington was pitching a fit over being able to leak information, and resigning over being called on the carpet for their illegal behavior, the media and Congress would be going after them left and right. Yet, surprisingly, they're only bugging out now, after their protector, Tenet, left. And it's supposedly a bad thing that these jerks are leaving. Hmmmmm. Makes you wonder, doesn't it, if Hayes is right and the WaPo is more interested in protecting the few sources at Langley who provide them with information than it is with reporting the whole story. Which leads to the next question: how is, what I believe to be, the imminent and monstrous shakeup at the CIA going to be reported over the coming months? How much is the media going to hamper the changes that Goss is obviously undertaking simply because they're afraid of losing what little access they have? Has the WaPo set the tone for the coverage of this event with this series of articles, or is Goss going to be given a fair shot at reforming an agency which the media has done nothing but criticize since 9/11? UPDATE: Jeff G. throws in his two cents.
UPDATE II: Jonathan Last disagrees with his Weekly Standard
compadre about whether all the hubbub is actually an indicator that
Goss is, indeed, cleaning house. Last has some valid insights, but I
completely disagree with his point that Goss need not piss off/clear
out all the entrenched bureaucrats to force the CIA to run efficiently,
citing FBI Director Muller's reform of the FBI as an example of what a
"skilled executive" can accomplish. Ah, nope. Sorry. That one's not
going to fly.
Muller took advantage of 9/11 in a way that Tenet was never forced to
do. He kept his job, and was never made to pay for the agency's
mistakes. Muller, however, took over the FBI in the days before 9/11:
no one in their right mind would ever slam him for the bureau's
mistakes, yet he took responsibility all the same and got to work.
Skill had very little to do with it, I believe, but more a thought that
if he goofed, his ass would be on the chopping block. For some unknown
reason, the CIA is cut more slack than the FBI. The FBI's spectacular
bungles over the past ten years have brought the bureau's vulnerability
to the fore. Muller knew this and acted accordingly.
The CIA and its employees, however, have never been called on the
carpet for all their goofs. They always seem to get away with it
because "they weren't funded well enough," or "their hands were tied
because of operating procedures," etc. The bureaucrats are too well
entrenched, and I truly believe that viper's pit has to be cleared out.
Goss, to my mind, knows this as well and he's using Patrick Murray to
do his dirty work. This way he gets to stay out of the fray and will be
able to lead when his time comes.